By Carly Stern, Ozy, July 22, 2019.
First-year medical student Anna Goshua was interviewing an emergency room physician in March to learn more about the job when she heard about a patient who had come all the way from Puerto Rico to that ER in Massachusetts for health care. Hurricane Maria had wiped out all prospects of the patient seeking care at home.
A surprised Goshua pored over her Stanford University curriculum to learn more about climate migrants. She realized the school offered no coursework about mental or physical illnesses linked to climate change, nor about the ways in which climate change is changing health care access. While the physical health impacts of climate change crises are more obvious, a growing volume of research over the past five years has demonstrated how changing weather patterns are also leading to a ballooning global mental health burden. That’s both in the form of increasing depression and anxiety about the growing crisis, as well as mental health conditions that stem from climate change effects. The American Psychological Association in a March 2017 report said the “tolls on our mental health [from climate change] are far-reaching.” Yet universities have lagged behind in incorporating the subject into their programs. Until now.
A growing number of schools are beginning to introduce a curriculum that promises to help America produce its first set of professionals trained at school to identify and address this crisis. This summer, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health introduced a course dedicated to climate change and mental health, while the Yale School of Public Health created a course looking at mental disorders associated with climate change. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) began holding faculty workshops in 2016 so that professors could transform their courses to examine adverse mental and physical health effects of climate change, as well as the environmental impacts of the health care industry. Beyond medical schools, University of Washington Bothell professor Jennifer Atkinson introduced a course on ecological grief last spring.
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